Mystery Solved: Why Some People Love Twitter — and Why Others Don’t

April 26, 2013

If you Google “Twitter is stupid”, you will find many people asking what Twitter is good for and why some people love it so much. They have tried and found it utterly useless. I did too. Since Twitter was founded in 2006, I’ve tried at least three different times in the past, dedicating a significant amount of time learning about Twitter and using it, and every time, I failed to understand the point of it. Sure, we all have things we don’t enjoy that others passionately love. I have no interest in watching sports, but I can at least understand why many people love it. What bothers me about Twitter is that I do not understand it even theoretically. But now I think I’ve finally solved this big mystery.

First let’s consider the arguments against Twitter. Twitter cannot function effectively as a news aggregator (like RSS readers) because so much of the content is people making casual remarks. Important pieces of information get buried in the noise. Twitter cannot help us keep in touch with our friends and families because most of us do not actively use it. (Most of my own “followers” are strangers.) We cannot share meaningful ideas because of the number of characters allowed is capped at 140. It’s just enough to share the title and the URL of the article you want to share. It’s not a great place to share photos either; Instagram can do that much better.

So, why do anyone use Twitter? There are a few factors involved, and I found some explanations on the Web but the key concept that we need to understand is how our sense of relevance is distributed across time. Let’s call it “time-relevance distribution”. Compare, for instance, a Wall Street trader and a carpenter. In order to do their jobs well, they need information. Suppose we throw a hundred random pieces of information at them, and they are to pick the ones they find useful or interesting. We then place them on a timeline by looking at the time associated with each. One may be about the latest iPhone that Apple announced 10 minutes ago. The other may be about the research conducted on the archival characteristics of different types of wood which was published 10 years ago. Let’s say, the Wall Street trader found the former useful, so we place the former on the timeline at 10 minutes. The carpenter found the latter relevant to his job, so we place it on his timeline at 10 years. If we are to repeat this for all 100 pieces of information, we would probably get two distinct curves on the timeline. See the hypothetical graph below.

As you can see, the distribution of the Wall Street trader, as represented by the blue area, is heavily skewed to the recent past. To him, if any piece of information is more than a day old, it’s not particularly relevant or useful. In comparison, the carpenter, as represented by the red area, is not particularly concerned about the timeliness of the information. In fact, he is more interested in matters pertaining to timelessness.

Journalists, fashion designers, event planners, and weather forecasters are very much like the Wall Street trader. And, English teachers, philosophers, farmers, and whiskey makers are more like the carpenter. And, I believe we all naturally gravitate towards timeliness or timelessness. This is the key difference between those who use Twitter and those who don’t.

Twitter in real life is equivalent to CB radio where truck drivers share information about what is going on now with other truck drivers who happen to be near one another (who are also interested in the same information). Most of them wouldn’t be interested in hearing a recording of their communication from an hour ago.

In contrast, Facebook is equivalent to Post-it notes we leave for other people to see. We do not expect the others to be paying attention to it in real-time. (If the others are here now, we would rather tell them verbally.) On Facebook, we leave the information for others to consume within a day or two. The common mistake that people (including myself) make on Twitter is that they leave messages thinking that people would read them later (as they do on Facebook), but this is not what Twitter is really for.

Blogs extend time-relevance further. A typical blog is equivalent to a bulletin board where fliers can remain push-pinned for weeks. Some blog posts remain relevant for years, and people do find and read them through search engines. Many of my old posts continue to receive as many visitors as my latest one, because they enter my site directly to individual posts, bypassing the home page. The impact that home page has on the popularity of individual contents is becoming less significant these days because Google is functioning as their home page.

Time-relevance distribution of young people tends to be skewed toward the present, like that of the Wall Street trader above, because their own life experience is skewed towards the present. If you are 20 years old, things that happened in the last 20 years would naturally be more interesting to you than those that happened 50 years ago. And as we grow older, we become more interested in what remains timeless because we witness them in our own lives. (Teenagers cannot personally experience timelessness.) People who live in the city tend to be skewed towards the present than those who live in the country because things change much more quickly in urban areas.

Because time-relevance distribution is different for everyone, we naturally choose mediums that are more appropriate for our own. If you are primarily concerned about timeless matters, you are going to have a hard time understanding why anyone would use Twitter because there is nothing interesting for you in the highly compressed area of the timeline for which Twitter is optimized.

Twitter in essence is a reincarnation of AOL chat rooms. In the early 90s, most people weren’t paying much attention to the Internet until AOL introduced the idea of chat rooms. The rooms were generally divided by topics of interest, and strangers who shared the same interest came in and chatted with one another. Eventually they would form loose communities. This idea of chat rooms gradually waned in popularity but Twitter picked up where AOL left off. On the facade, Twitter does not look like an instant messaging program, but it does the same thing. The concept of “room” is replaced by “hashtag”. Hashtags form temporary rooms where those who share the same interest gather and chat. This is why the 140-character limit is still prevailing on Twitter; if you think about Twitter as a platform for real-time conversation (like instant messaging or texting), why would you need more than 140 characters? In a face-to-face conversation, if you kept talking for more than 140 words (without letting the other person talk), you would be considered rude.

Most of us use instant messaging or texting even if we don’t use Twitter. The only significant difference between the two is that Twitter is designed to connect and chat with strangers. It’s a public instant messaging platform (like AOL chat was). Many married people use instant messaging and texting with their own spouses to coordinate domestic duties. In the same way, Twitter users are sharing and coordinating information about events that are happening now, but with strangers. This is why it is highly useful for states of emergency like the Boston bombing and Hurricane Sandy. It is also useful for businesses like airlines, event venues, and Internet service providers who need to communicate with their customers in real-time on a public platform (so that they would not need to repeat the same information to every customer). To find Twitter useful, you must be interested not only in timely matters, but also in connecting with strangers.

My conclusion: If you do not have any need to coordinate and share information on a real-time basis with the general public, Twitter is not for you. For my own business, I need to be informed of the latest technologies but whether the information is an hour old or a month old makes no material difference. In other topics, I’m more interested in timeless matters. I would imagine that Twitter is useless for the majority of people. It is a tool for those whose time-relevance distribution is heavily compressed into matters of minutes and hours, not days or months. Very few people have such needs, but it does not necessarily mean that they are doing something “stupid” or superficial. The common hostility towards Twitter users comes from the fear of not knowing/understanding what they do. I too had this nagging feeling that I’m missing out on something important to everyone, which is what lead me to investigate. Now I think I can leave them alone in peace.

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Against Branding — Design and Conflict on Design Observer raises an interesting question but is not argued well. With his critique of Amnesty International posters, his issue appears to be consistency or homogeneity of the looks. He says, “While I’m not claiming that there’s no room for consistency in visual identity design, isn’t the uncritical application of any communications methodology asking for trouble?”

If consistency per se is not the problem, he needs to explain why the rebranded versions are “uncritical.” He fails to explain the relationship between consistency and lack of critical analysis. They are not necessarily related. As a branding strategy, it’s possible to deliberately employ inconsistency while being uncritical, and it’s also possible to be consistent while being critical.

His bigger issue appears to be the socio-economic class. Unfortunately here too, he doesn’t explain how exactly branding contributes or perpetuates the problem. The mechanism is not at all clear in his arguments.

For instance, he uses São Paulo as proof that “removing these signs helped reveal the stark poverty of the favelas (urban slums).” But how? He doesn’t explain. In fact, his claim goes counter to his quoting of Barthes. Barthes’ point isn’t that “myths” veil or hide “class division”, but that they normalize it. That is, manipulative branding or advertising can turn a problem into an identity to be embraced. It does not veil or hide “the stark poverty”; it presents the poverty ubiquitously in order to normalize it. It does the opposite of veiling.

In this sense, the aspect of Donald Trump’s branding that needs a critical analysis is not his vodka but his use of baseball caps during the presidential campaign. Baseball cap is a symbol of the rural working class. The 1-percenters like Trump do not wear baseball caps. It was part of the effort to turn the socio-economic plight into an identity, to normalize the income inequality. This is where Barthes’ analysis of myth becomes relevant.

Between the branding strategies used by Trump and Clinton, the latter was decidedly more “corporate.” Take a look at Trump’s baseball cap; it’s decidedly un-corporate. It’s set in a generic serif font and is barely designed. But I would bet that it was a strategic decision NOT to design it well, to keep it looking lowbrow. Clinton’s branding, designed by Pentagram’s Michael Bierut, was much more corporate, but its sophistication is also a signifier for the urban elitism that the rural working class detests. Trump’s campaign understood this, and Clinton’s didn’t. In one interview I saw, Michael Moore said he suggested making baseball caps to Clinton’s campaign early on but they ridiculed his idea. He said he realized how out of touch they were with the rural working class then.

What this tells us is that whether your branding campaign looks consistent and corporate has nothing to do with whether you are being critical. Clinton’s campaign was out of touch with the people they claim to fight for. If they are not even aware of their plights, how could they be critical in the first place? Trump’s campaign was at least in touch with their people, and knew how to exploit it using deliberately unsophisticated, un-corporate branding strategies.

For most people, “Daily Affirmation with Stuart Smalley” is what Facebook is. It’s a system to receive daily affirmations, to confirm their own biases, to congratulate one another. It’s not a platform where you challenge the ideas of others and others challenge yours. It’s not a peer review system.

Given what we have learned since the election, I’m now willing to say that Trump is preferable to Clinton (as Zizek declared before the election). It’s a high cost but it’s better than eight more years of oppressing the rural working class and suppressing their anger and despair. The outcome of that after eight more years would have been a lot worse.

I saw the problem before the election but had no clue how bad it was. When I wrote the articles explaining why the rural working class would vote for Trump, I was shocked by the reactions I received from my friends. They did not see it at all. Not only that; they became angry at me for writing them. In other words, the Left’s unawareness of the problem was not just lack of curiosity or a result of living in a bubble; it was ideological ignorance. That is, they felt they SHOULD ignore the plight of the rural working class. It was an ideological war against the rural values. Clinton’s use of the word “deplorables” is reflective of this. Had Clinton been elected, this war, which the Left was dominating, would have continued for another eight years. The problem Richard Rorty saw in the 90s would have devasted the entire middle class by then, both rural and urban. It would have been everyone’s problem, except for the top 0.1%.

The key contributing factor, which was not often talked about in this election cycle, is the speed of the technological evolution. The reason why startups are so popular is because technology is super-effective and efficient in amassing the wealth for the very few. Its ability to “scale” the profit without raising the cost is almost infinite. The first group of people to see the consequences of this scary efficiency was the rural whites. Those in the lower class, I don’t think, saw the decline because they were already at the bottom, as low as anyone could go without dying.

The income disparity is the biggest problem we are seeing globally. All the other problems we are seeing, like racism and xenophobia, are merely the symptoms of this main problem. Fighting racism is like taking an aspirin to remove the symptoms of the illness without attending to the cause.

According to this study, corporate programs designed to reduce managerial bias through education like diversity training had an overall negative impact: a 7 percent decline in the odds for black women to get managerial positions and an 8 percent decline in the odds for black men.

If a well-meaning effort to combat racism can have a negative impact, what do you think verbally attacking your political opponents of being racists would do? Let’s think about this before we further contribute to racism.

The fact that virtually all entertainers of all colors and creeds support the Democrats tells us how in touch they are with the American ideals. The fact that they lost the election despite all their emotional power tells us how out of touch they are with the American reality.

This election inspired me to reach out to people with a greater diversity of values; religious, political, national, regional, educational, socio-economic, professional, etc.. Our culture has been too focused on diversity in terms of how we look and has neglected our inner differences. We let “diversity” become a mere buzzword. Because we cannot see our values, we’ve conveniently excused our prejudices.

Through the Internet, we are able to create highly customized bubbles of our own. Our Facebook timelines are great representations of them. Each of our timelines is a unique bubble that caters to our needs and desires. We can judge the people outside of our bubbles all we want without the risk of being judged by them. This isolation, comfort, and safety magnify our fears about the world outside of our bubbles. Our tolerance for different values has weakened to an alarming level.

In our modern societies, the fear and anger towards the other will likely grow over time because of these technologies.

The best way to overcome our fear is to know more about it. “Ignorance” is not lack of knowledge—we cannot know everything—but judging without the willingness to know.

Ignorance permeated both sides of the political spectrum in this election. Both sides feared one another, yet made little to no effort to know one another. They let themselves be so overwhelmed with the fear of the other that they just shut down, and made no effort to reach out to the other side.

The political scientist interviewed in this article did the right thing. For about a decade, she traveled back and forth to rural towns in order to understand “why they feel the way they feel, why they vote the way they vote.” This article was published on Election Day before the result came out, but I think Trump’s victory lends further credibility to her theory.

There is a vast divide between the rural USA and the urban USA. We no longer understand one another. Ugly bigotry actually exists on both sides. The liberals are lucky because there is no shameful term like “racism” to label their own version. The closest word is perhaps “elitism.”

I don’t know why the media endorses presidential candidates. Once you publicly declare your position, you would naturally start defending your position. Gradually everything you say will be positional. Positional debates are not constructive.

I’m not saying that the media should not have an “editorial” department; in fact, I believe they should. There are theories, hypotheses, and speculations that cannot be backed up by facts. I think this is the hole that bloggers filled. I noticed this during the financial crisis of 2008. Because the news media were limited to reporting what can be backed up by facts and avoid making speculations, I turned to bloggers for more relevant information and their expert interpretations of what was happening.

Theories, hypotheses, and speculations do not have to be positional. The media could make their best guesses at what Henry Paulson was thinking during the crisis, and they wouldn’t be taking any sides. It’s still value-neutral. They could debate about the potential impact of Trump’s immigration policies without making a value judgment, simply speculate what they think will happen.

Speculation is often looked at as a bad thing but we all need to speculate to some degree to prepare ourselves for the future, and the media play an important role in that. They cannot provide just facts. Their audience also need structural frameworks to make their own judgment. Facts alone are not useful unless the reader is an expert on the subject. It’s like supplying random ingredients without teaching them the basic skills of cooking. But they don’t need to tell the readers that lasagna is better than ziti. Endorsing a presidential candidate is as absurd as declaring which religion is the best.

If they are going to claim that they are unbiased and objective, they need to do a much better job at being unbiased. Otherwise, they need to declare themselves to be a biased media outlet and state their bias up-front. It’s the pretense that’s harmful. In this election, I think we witnessed how harmful it is. The media was completely out of touch with the half of this country and mislead the country.